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06 Sept 2025
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06 Sept 2025
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Ireland's most popular baby names of 2021 have been published
The Central Statistics Office (CSO) has revealed Ireland's most popular baby names of 2021.
The overall most popular names in the country were revealed to be Fiadh for girls and Jack for boys.
In Donegal, the most popular name for baby boys born last year was James while for girls it was Grace.
Jack has held the top spot since 2007, with the exception of 2016 when James was the most popular boys name.
It's the first time Fiadh has taken the overall number one spot for girls.
There were several new entries to the Top 100 list nationally, including Hunter, Páidí, Brody, Arlo and Tiernan for boys, and Lottie, Ayla and Indie for girls.
Ted was flagged as a fast riser, taking the 90th most popular spot on the list (having risen 49 places), along with Croía in 52nd place (up 43 places).
Where both parents were from the EU14 (excluding Ireland), Liam was the most favoured boys' name, while Leon was the name chosen most often by parents from the EU15 to EU27.
Muhammad was the highest ranked name of baby boys born where both parents were from outside the EU.
The CSO noted there was a wider variety in the names registered for girls (with 4,741 girls' names in 2021) compared with 3,863 names for boys.
Data on surnames was also collected.
Of 58,442 live births in 2021, 19,701 had unique surnames, including some double-barrelled surnames such as Byrne-Kelly.
The three most common surnames given to babies was revealed to be Murphy at 714 (1.2%), Kelly at 551 (0.9%) and Ryan at 468 (0.8%).
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